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"Wikinews is not Wikipedia!" This is the rallying cry sometimes heard at Wikinews. Because of the wild success of Wikipedia, Wikinews has been closely scrutinized by citizen journalists and the traditional press throughout its development. In this past quarter, the community has often been compared to Wikipedia, despite being a very different project with different goals and measures.

Wikinews has grown rapidly. At the start of the year the project had editions in two languages; now it has eleven. What began as a few hundred editors has grown to over 2000 registered users competing for productivity and quality of story writing. Within the Wikimedia family the project continues to have impressive growth, with the third largest increase in registered users for the past two months, and the largest article growth rate1.

Some noteworthy events this quarter included both the German and the English editions reaching their 1000th news article. One important goal of the project is to develop an archive of historical articles which may be used as references by others, including Wikipedia2,3, as a record of world and local events.

The project continues to generate interest in the journalistic spheres; for example, the English edition was featured in articles in Business Week4 and the New York Times5 (requires registration). Critical coverage of Wikinews has been of great interest within the project, and has ranged from Simon Waldman's analysis and EditorsWeblog rebuttal to Korby Parnell's near cheerleading. Overall there is no consistency to its critical reception; some reviewers love the project, some hate it. While most have both good and bad things to say about it, it has been picked, panned, and praised.

Members of the Wikinews community have reached out to other journalism efforts as well. en:Jimmy Wales and others attended the Harvard conference Blogging, Journalism & Credibility, which led to the organization of an IRC chat conference with bloggers, asking them for input on Wikinews development priorities. A representative was invited to speak at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, and similar presentations are being contemplated for the future.

Wikinewsies continue to experiment with the project. Members of the project have created a range of software tools as well, including WeatherChecker which retrieves weather data, Wikinews Flickr License Search to search Flickr for images by license type to illustrate stories, and the Wikinewsbot for automated Wikinews content retrieval and upload.

Wikinews contest
The first English Wikinews writing contest ran for 40 days, a test of endurance which produced hundreds of articles and ended in a three-way tie. Between them, HiFlyer, Simeon, and Pingswept produced over 100 articles, on top of the dozens more produced by eight other competitors. I encourage readers from other Wikinews editions to consider the possibility of implementing similar local contests.

Demotic script on a replica of the rosetta stone on display in Magdeburg.By Chris 73

To be excited about a dictionary, you have to be crazy. I must confess, I am guilty as charged... Consider that you cannot understand a word you are trying to understand, if you do not already know the concept. A dictionary should offer all words for all concepts; an ideal dictionary would offer all words in all languages.

But what does this mean? There are many kinds of dictionaries. Traditional dictionaries, listing words with definitions and history; glossaries, thesauri, and translation dictionaries. Wiktionary is bold; it wants to be all of these. Under the current software, the wiktionaries in different languages all contain largely the same content — lists of words and languages. Only their definitions change from one language to the next. Wouldn't it be nice for the Wiktionary entry on a word to be available automatically in every Wiktionary language?

The ideal of a single ultimate Wiktionary for all languages is a dream for people who care about such resources. Merging the different communities is not easy. What I personally like best is that such a project would give me a place to put the glossary of botanical terms compiled by Herman Busser. Herman was a remarkable person in the Dutch cactus and succulent world who published several papers on cacti. His glossary was given to me before his death, to give it another lease on life.

Technically, this combined Wiktionary requires an extension to the Mediawiki software, something like the Wikidata project. This would allow for fields where users can select predefined values, to indicate, for instance, that a word is an English language word. Other fields might include text with wikisyntax. An implementation of Wikidata is underway, and we are slowly progressing toward such a Wiktionary.

As I write this, I am still dreaming: what would it be like if we had not just the GEMET thesaurus, but the other EU thesauri as well; would it not be grand to have a resource in Papiamento or Hopi? I wonder how many dreams will come true, and what we will dream up next once we have an ultimate Wiktionary.

A French arbitration committee was elected on March 22, 2005. This election was the result of a process begun on September 19, 2004 to decide firstly whether such a committee was needed, and secondly what its powers and rules would be.

Conflicts in 2004 had exposed the shortcomings of the French-speaking community's previous conflict resolution methods. Previously, the community had held public votes to decide upon which editors to impose sanctions. The voting periods invited personal attacks and an excessive number of vote pages. Voters would hesitate to commit to one position or the other, in the end voting for reasons of loyalty or based on actions unrelated to the one being disputed. To make matters worse, page histories were difficult to follow, resulting in uninformed voting and subjective opinions. The atmosphere became so unpleasant for everyone that civility in the community began to collapse.

After three successive sessions discussing adoption of the policies, the arbitration committee was allowed to proceed subject to certain rules:

The committee would reserve the right to decline a request for arbitration.

The committee members, or referees, would settle individual cases rather than setting rules for behavior for the whole site. Such rules should be based on consensus within the entire community rather than the arbitration committee acting on its own.

The referees can establish and use precedence in deciding future cases as long as they provide a concise explanation of how the cases are comparable.

Wikimedia Commons was launched on September 7, 2004 as a free repository of multimedia files (including images, sounds, and video) to be used on all projects of the Wikimedia foundation. It has developed faster than any other Wikimedia project. By April 16, 2005, over 76,000 multimedia files were available, and the site had over 5,250 users, including 53 administrators and 2 bureaucrats.

Multilingualism is probably the most difficult challenge to address on the Commons. This single project directly serves the collected sites of the foundation in every language. Contributors to the Commons, from all languages, must be able to communicate with each other without language barriers becoming insurmountable obstacles. The possibility of assigning one or more categories directly to images, and of being able to visualize image labels from their category page entries, has been one early response to this problem of multilingualism in searching for files. Within the pages of the Commons site, users have developed a significant linguistic infrastructure, with the principal help pages available in some ten languages.

However, the creation of a coordination center for translations has made it possible to reduce the need for translating the various help pages. The interface for the Commons is also available in the majority of Wikipedia languages. A final revealing detail: for every fifteen English-language administrators, there are thirteen German administrators, six in French, three in Dutch, three in Polish, two in Russian, two in Swedish, and one each in Romanian, Japanese, Portuguese, Icelandic, Hebrew, Czech, Bulgarian and Belarusian.

The Commons has seen the addition of many design features to improve the ease of use of its files. The central feature of the Commons is that its files can be included directly on other Wikimedia Foundation sites without needing to copy them into the local database for each site. Another new feature is a sidebar link that displays a gallery of the most recently uploaded files, with a thumbnail of each image. A new "gallery" software library, developed for the latest version of the MediaWiki software, allows for these thumbnails to be constructed quickly.

Though the Commons exists primarily to provide a service to the other Wikimedia Foundation projects, the users of the Commons quickly implemented the kinds of tools for community interaction that one finds on the Wikipedia sites—in particular, a "café" for general conversation, and a page for voting to remove individual files. A separate mailing list and IRC channel were created (#commons.wikimedia). A specific community spirit has thus been gradually developed. This spirit is particularly well-expressed in a recent vote for high-quality images: nominations for such 'featured' images are discussed and voted upon every day. Some of these images are of great beauty, and are often the personal work of gifted Commoners. 86 images have thus been chosen so far. In these featured images one can see a sign of the vitality and originality of this project, hardly seven months old, yet already seen by some as one of the most beautiful achievements of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikiquote project is a multilingual, open-content compendium of quotations. On March 25, 2005 the project reached 10,000 total articles, according to Pumpie, an editor on English Wikiquote. This was 21 months since the project's start in July 2003.

As of March 31, 22 of over 70 Wikiquote languages are very active. About 4,000 user accounts have been created in total, along with many unregistered editors (as on other projects). There are currently four Wikiquote projects, English, German, French and Polish, with more than 1,000 articles; the largest being English with almost 2,700 articles. Among the top ten Wikiquotes, eight are in European languages, and two in Asian languages - Chinese and Japanese. Among the non-latin-alphabet projects, Bulgarian is the largest, with over 500 articles.

Most Wikiquote languages focus on authors who wrote in their own language, but there are many good translation. Some Wikiquote languages, including the Japanese and English projects, show a strong inclination to reference the original text, and many quotes are accompanied by original texts. This inclination is readily observed in the extensive collections of proverbs.

Persian, (فارسی), is a language with a rich tradition that is the official language in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan and is widely spoken in Uzbekistan.

AdamM's Persian teacher really liked the idea of a wiki when it was shown to her, and she was really happy when it was suggested that she put her training materials on Wikibooks.

Realizing this idea proved to be a struggle. Learning Persian is like going back to primary school — you are learning to recognize the shapes and sounds of characters when you learn your first words. It involves learning words you may not be interested in, chosen to introduce a few characters at a time. The materials in question are being used to teach Persian to men and women with Iranian partners who live in the Netherlands. To these people it is particularly important to speak well, as many pupils go to Iran after learning the basics to meet their new families for the first time.

All of the Persian texts have been pronounced, recorded, and uploaded to the Commons, a process that proved to be troublesome: sound files use the naming scheme xx.word.ogg, where xx is the ISO 639 code. When this was applied to a word like برادر, you get fa-برادر.ogg. A file with this name cannot be uploaded with Firefox, cannot be saved with Audacity, and cannot be listened to with Ashampoo. You can, however, use Internet Explorer to upload such a file to Commons.

The upload functionality received a facelift while this was going on, making it possible to upload a file and add all of its categories at once, which cut down the time needed for these uploads by more than half.

As Persian is read from right to left, it makes sense to have the Persian material in the fa.wikibooks.org domain and not in the nl: or the en: domain. This leads to a not-so-funny problem. The symbol that indicates an external link does not move to the left in a Persian article; instead, it obscures the first characters in a word, making it somewhat unreadable. Luckily there is a <div class="plainlinks"> style which removes this nuisance on an article-by-article basis. Depending on which browser you use, an article such as PersianLes2 may be almost impossible to edit, even for people familiar with wiki syntax.

We currently have articles with Persian pronunciations, and intend to add Dutch words and phrases to Wiktionary as well. This way we hope to have many functional translations, to make it easy to localize the material for students of Persian who speak other languages. For now, please enjoy the current English-Persian wikibook.

In January 2005 the PlanetMath Exchange project was started by Derek Williams to assist in content exchange between Wikipedia and PlanetMath, a community-based math encyclopedia begun in 2001 whose content is released under the terms of the GFDL. The project aims to enrich the content of mathematics articles on Wikipedia. Although there are currently only nine participants, nearly 500 articles from PlanetMath have been examined, and about 40% have had content merged into Wikipedia. Oleg Alexandrov has since written some scripts to help automate the process; statistics for the project are available on the statistics page.

A Japanese Wikipedian contributed an article on a landmark from his hometown, the Osezaki Lighthouse (大瀬崎灯台), to the Japanese Wikipedia. He found a nice photo on the web and asked the photographer if he could use it on Wikipedia. He received permission from the copyright holder and uploaded this image to Wikipedia, but forgot to add licence information to the image. When the image became a candidate to be featured on the Main Page of the Japanese Wikipedia, another Wikipedian pointed out the omission, and made him aware of the seriousness of careful copyright and licensing. He mailed the copyright holder again to explain the GFDL, and to ask him to release the image under its terms. The photographer agreed willingly. This photographer had been frequently bothered by copyright infringements, including one by an official municipality website, and he felt that these sites neglected the value of his works and his effort. The Wikipedian's request therefore impressed him greatly, and the young contributor realized how important it is to respect copyright in order to promote the project.

Wikimedia Deutschland actively promoted Wikimedia projects this quarter, organizing presences at the world's biggest computer fair, Cebit, in Hannover, and at the book fair in Leipzig. These two events, one sponsored by Linux New Media AG, and the other by Directmedia Publishing (the producer of the Wikipedia DVD), were successful. The people manning the booths, including Southpark, Mathias Schindler, Nina, Arne Klempert and Elian, had no need to explain to visitors what Wikipedia was - this was already widely known. However, they answered many questions about how Wikipedia actually works.

On the invitation of Axel Schäfer, a member of the German parliament, Mathias Schindler, Kurt Jansson and Elian spent a week in Berlin, taking initial steps in the political arena. They spoke with several politicians, explaining the workings of Wikipedia and its special problems with copyright law as it stands.

On a sadder note: Achim Raschka, beloved organizer of the international and German writing contests, left the board for personal reasons.

As of the end of March, there were around 150 members of the German Verein.

Wikimédia France, the association representing the French chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, held its first regular Assemblée générale (general meeting of members) to elect the new Conseil d'administration (board) and to discuss many things. The newly elected board can be seen here, and a short summary about the association should soon be displayed.

The règlement intérieur (a complement to the initial bylaws) was voted on and officially adopted. The association Treasurer can finally open a bank account after a formal vote from the board. And many new people joined the association. In the coming weeks, the board is expected to organize teams to work on different matter; in particular, to find money and partnerships for the Wikimedia projects.

The association purchased the wikimedia.fr domain name. It plans to set up a public chapter website at that domain, using a wiki running on one of the Paris squids.

Wikipedia was well covered by English and German press in 2004, but only started being covered by press in other languages after the one-millionth article press release. In 2005, for non-English languages the press has finally reached the stage when their stories are no longer merely a basic explanation of what Wikipedia "is" for an audience unaware of the project. They are focusing more on breaking news or interviews about specific issues. In many countries, it seems that Wikipedia is now considered a reference, without need for further description. For example, in January the potential Google deal was heavily commented on in the press and on blogs in many languages.

Editors in many languages are now regularly interviewed on specific issues on their own projects. For instance, see the interview with Anthere in neteconomie.com about the Foundation's opinion on projects such as the Google Print Library Project, the NYPL Digital Gallery, or the altruistic behavior of firms like Yahoo!.

A second trend is that more and more information is published on projects other than Wikipedia, especially Wikinews (the media love to write about themselves). Major reports were in Businessweek, the NYT, and Wired.

On the positive side, Wikipedia was described by The Guardian (February 27) as "The best example yet of the capacity of the internet to coalesce into self-regulating networks" [15].

Wired Magazine (March 2005) took an in-depth look at some of the most active Wikipedians, and described Wikipedia as "the self-organising library of the future [16]. Meanwhile, CNN and many other news outlets reported comments made by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web, who said at a conference that wiki software embodied many of his original visions for the internet as a tool for collaboration, and that Wikipedia was "a great example of how people want to be creative and not just suck in information" [17].

Wikipedia's coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami generated a great deal of interest in the project, with The Financial Times (January 9) describing Wikipedia as "The only instant reference work" [18]. In The Observer on the same day, a column compared Wikipedia to the bee that defies the laws of aerodynamics by flying, stating that though Wikipedia "ought to be a disaster", it was in fact "an exceedingly useful online reference work" [19].

The widely circulated criticism of Robert McHenry, former Encyclopædia Britannica editor (discussed below), triggered an article in Free Software Magazine (March 2005), outlining the advantages of a freely-editable encyclopaedia over traditional works [20], and accusing Britannica of adopting underhanded techniques to try and discredit a serious threat to its reputation.

Wikipedia and Wikinews were mentioned on LCI, an important news french television channel. It was only during a few minutes in a show about wikis, but it is one of the rare mentions of Wikipedia on television.

In an article posted on New Year's Eve on Kuro5hin [21], Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger inveighed against the project he had been a leading part of until 2002 under the title, "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism." Sanger complained that experts were not treated with sufficient respect, that lack of deference to expertise would be fatal to the long term credibility of the project, and that the project had a "certain poisonous social atmosphere" because of problem users. His stance was reported by Wired Magazine[22] and many others.

His comments were much discussed. Danah Boyd, writing on the Many-to-Many weblog [23], said she was 'often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia'. In an ongoing debate with fellow columnist Clay Shirky, Boyd also complained about the lack of known authorship [24].

Shirky, an ardent supporter of Wikipedia, took a more positive view than Boyd. But Sanger, commenting on Shirky's entries, accused him of having a 'religious faith in the superiority of Wikipedia's system' [25]. As a followup, Wired Magazine also took a look at some problems faced by Wikipedia in terms of becoming a respected reference source [26].

As former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Robert McHenry penned further criticism of Wikipedia, following his scathing attack last year in an article entitled 'The faith-based encyclopædia'. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, he described the project as "...a small and self-selected group convincing itself...that it is in some ineffable way superior" [27].

A story by the Washington Post caused controversy when it was found to contain misinformation which originated in a Wikipedia article about the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake [28]. The news story alleged that priests had 'roamed the streets, hanging those they believed had incurred God's wrath' after the quake, but investigations by a Catholic radio presenter found that the line could be traced back to a Wikipedia article on the quake [29]. One blogger described it as having "originated in an unsourced, wholly imaginary Wikipedia entry" [30].

Perhaps testament to the growing influence of Wikipedia in the public conscience, news outlets often assume that Wikitravel is an offshoot of Wikipedia [31]. Another frequent error has been for reporters to refer to the predecessor of Wikipedia as 'Newpedia' rather than 'Nupedia', with culprits including The Guardian [32] and Nature [33].

Brazilian magazine Veja noted how easy it can be to vandalise Wikipedia in an article on January 26, when it added false information to the English Wikipedia's article on Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Romanian magazine Evenimentul Zilei seemed surprised to discover that anyone could edit Wikipedia, announcing to a shocked nation that this editable encyclopaedia "isn't a joke, it really exists" [34].

The German online edition of Der Spiegel, one of the country's top-selling news sources, was found in February to have plagiarised an article from the German Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was copied verbatim by the paper, including grammatical errors, but retracted and replaced with an apology [35] when the plagiarism was uncovered [36].

And despite Wikipedia's insistence that it is not a social experiment, The Guardian touted it on January 13 as an example of "the resurgence of communism - in its primeval form - on the internet" [37].

A growing number of conferences were attended by Wikimedians this quarter, both as speakers and as booth-tenders. Here are reports on some of the most remarkable and interesting.

Meanwhile, the Wikimania team is busy preparing for the Wikimania conference, the first international Wikimedia conference, to be held in August 2005. We hope you will be able to participate; we have kept entrance fees very low to make attendance as painless as possible. You can register for the conference online.

Fosdem is a yearly event in Brussels, Belgium; and was a great opportunity to meet many of the "Who's Who" of the Open Software/Free Software community. Jimmy had been asked to give the keynote speech for the 2005 event, so it was important to get some presence on the floor as well.

Many people were involved in planning this event. Waerth played a key part: as he was living in Brussels, he handled much of the printing of pamphlets and leaflets; French leaflets came in the mail from Anthere, and he printed German and Dutch leaflets and laminated A2 posters. Elian helped finish making a beautiful set of leaflets — late one night, she had many people scramble to finish the Dutch text and produce a professional product. Everything came together in Brussels, and the attendees had a great time.

From March 10-12, Wikimedia was present at CeBIT, the world's biggest computer fair, in Hannover, Germany. Our booth was located in the lovely neighbourhood of projects like Debian, KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice at the Linuxpark. Brockhaus was also present at CeBIT, in the same hall as Wikimedia. Unlike most other open source projects, Wikimedia had an entire booth devoted to it, with a table for a presentation computer and for leaflets. Decoration and equipment was scarce — posters left over from FOSDEM 2005 were used, and Nina used her brand new iBook as the presentation computer.

TIC is a sustainable development conference; its latest event, TIC21, took place in France in February 2005. Anthere was asked to write an article on how Wikipedia is related to sustainable development for a TIC21 newsletter, and invited to participate at the TIC conference. Wikimedia has since been invited to give a presentation for next year's conference by one of the organisers.

Wikimedia was invited to the PixelACHE electronic art festival and its Dot Org Boom seminar, which took place in April 2005 in Helsinki, Finland. Florence Devouard was the Wikipedia ambassador for three presentations; one in the Finnish embassy in Stockholm, and the other two in Helsinki.

The festival provided an opportunity for a meetup with three editors in Stockholm (Lars Aronsson of Project Runeberg and Susning.nu, Steve Rapaport, and Sabina Rapaport Romlin) and two in Helsinki (Timo and Cimon). Steve wrote up a biased but appreciated report afterwards.

Jimmy Wales is going to give a talk at the mid-November WSIS meeting. He also asked that Wikimedia be represented at the next Prepcom (19-30 September, in Geneva, Switzerland) with a booth run by Wikimedia volunteers. He also suggested a workshorp to be run for people who want to learn more about how Wikipedia functions.

Wikimania 2005 - The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005. The conference is accepting papers and other submissions through the end of May (from people both within and outside the Wikimedia and Wikipedia communities) for presentations, workshops, and discussion groups. Suggestions are also being accepted for speaker panels, keynote speakers, and other activities. Submissions may be sent to cfp--at--wikimedia.org; other inquiries to info--at--wikimedia.org. Freely licensed works are preferred. We strongly encourage you to license submissions under GFDL or CC. You can also directly write the paper at http://meta.wikimedia.org or another wiki.

The audience will consist primarily of around 300 active Wikimedians from all over the world. Translation services will be available at the conference. The speakers list will be finalized at the end of June, and attendees will be encouraged to coordinate their own additional activities ahead of time.

Some of our fellow wikimedians get involved with the Foundation's work by means other than editing. Below are descriptions of a partnership started with Kennisnet and a report on the use of intellectual property in France, both of which came about through the independent efforts of Wikimedians.

"Tigers have very bold black stripes on their fur."Wikijunior is developing educational material for children by adapting content on Wikipedia for their younger audience.By Malene Thyssen

Kennisnet is a group that provides proxies for Dutch schools. They were a major source of vandalism for the Dutch Wikipedia, and so most of the Dutch moderators did not like them. There were frequent discussions about what to do; should we block Kennisnet permanently or only for short periods, in order not to have the good suffer for the bad? We had contact with a few schools, which proved that we could cooperate if we knew whom to contact. Kennisnet was a central ISP; what could we do?

Then the Wikijunior project started, with a small grant to create educational content. This was an opportunity to approach Kennisnet: maybe we could get them interested in this project, and they could help us with the proxy problems. We arranged a meeting: two Wikimedians went to Zoetermeer. We were welcomed by a big panel of senior people from Kennisnet and introduced ourselves. It turned out they liked us, they knew us, and they immediately wanted to know what Kennisnet could do to improve the availability of Wikipedia!

It was thrilling to see how well received our efforts on new projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikinews were. Our perception of Kennisnet as an ISP proved to be totally wrong. Kennisnet was only the intermediary between schools and ISPs, overseeing a contract that provided Internet access; it was unfortunate that this contract was also called Kennisnet.

Our second meeting was amusing; the Wikipedians arrived in a big group, but due to sickness there was only one person from Kennisnet. Nevertheless, this proved to be a really important meeting. Kennisnet wanted to act like a partner; the basics for all the projects were identified: hosting, funding for Wikidata and improvements to Wiktionary, using Wikipedia and Wikinews within Kennisnet projects, and having kids contribute to Wikipedia. It was really brilliant. In all the excitement we had forgotten about the proxies, and about Wikijunior, but this is bound to come up at a next meeting...

by Yann Forget, with the help of Teofilo-Folengo, Emmanuel Legrand, and Nataraja.

This article reflects the opinions of its authors, which may not be those of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia editors have encountered problems in obtaining documents that should be largely accessible to the public. On the other hand, certain institutions are beginning to show an awareness of this problem.

Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Février. This illumination is the oldest known image of winter.By Petrusbarbygere

Several requests were made to French institutions to obtain authorization for the publication of documents in Wikipedia. Institutions contacted include the National Library of France and the photographic archives of the French Ministry for Culture.

In the first case, these are illuminations which have several centuries. Although The National Library of France authorized the reproduction, they did so only with restrictions, since they would not admit that these documents are in the public domain.

The second case concerned 19th Century photographs of which the ADAGP society and the historic monuments refuse any publication without the payment of royalties.

On March 15, 2005, the Supreme Court of Appeal, the highest French jurisdiction, handed down a very interesting judgment in the field of authors' rights. It involved the artists Daniel Buren and Christian Drevet, who are the authors of the refitting of Place des Terreaux, in Lyon. They reproached four editors for having reproduced and marketed postcards of the square without their authorization and mentioning their name on the back of the cards.

For Gérard Ducrey, lawyer of the Union professionnelle de la carte postale (Professional Postcard Union), this is a revolution in the image copyright law for works made by civil servants (...) a crushing blow to the operations of confiscation of public space by certain artists. Ducrey, more precisely, aims at architects, authors of famous buildings built with public money, who require a royalty each time their work appears in a newspaper, a book, on a postcard or on a poster. It is the case for the pyramid of the Louvre, the National Library of France, the Great Arch of La Défense...

This decision which makes jurisprudence will certainly have positive consequences on projects such as Wikipédia.

This French historical map, showing discoverings in present-day United States following a 1673 expedition, was kindly made available to Wikimedia by the National Library of France.By David Monniaux

The President of the French Republic recently intervened with the Ministry for Culture, asking for acceleration of the diffusion of French and European works on the Internet. He particularly asked for an analysis of the conditions under which the funds of the large French and European libraries could be enlarged and made more easily accessible on the Internet.

It would be interesting to see how this initiative could benefit the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In addition, three European countries - the United Kingdom, Italy and France - joined to create an Internet portal to display cultural collections. Other countries should join the project soon. Germany, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal have all expressed an interest in joining the Michael Project.

It would be interesting to intervene with the founders of this project so that works in the public domain are clearly identified and easily accessible.

It would be as useful to begin a campaign of lobbying to ask for the free licensing, or the dedicating to the public domain, as often as possible for the numerical diffusion of works, especially those produced on behalf of public administrations, within the framework of their function, as it is the case for certain administrations in the United States (but not all: in particular the administrations of the States and the municipalities can protect their intellectual productions by copyright) (cf. photographs by NASA and other American federal administrations) and in respect from the other problems of rights and for counter-balance Americanization of the contents available freely on line.

There is a proposed bill in the course of adoption by the French Parliament, which was adopted by the Council of Ministers on November 12, 2003. This says the title II tends to expressly recognize with the public agents the quality of author for the works carried out within the framework of their functions. The device considered aims at ensuring the effectivity of the recognition of the royalty while guaranteeing the administration which employs them the means of ensuring its mission of public service.

The 2003 report of the Public Edition Mediator contains a rather enigmatic quote: "A majority of the circulations on a free distribution of the given information does not permit global value, however." [38]

Initially, it would be necessary to benefit from the national feeling to ask for the publication of certain documents under a free licence (for example, photographs of the presidents of the French Republic). Then, one could widen the sphere of activity to other types of documents.

To write to French MPs asking them to adopt a legislation similar to the German law on the freedom of panorama (de:Panoramafreiheit), which makes it possible for photographers to exempt the majority of royalties when work photographed is on a public highway.

I think that, in the long run, our role is to promote the ideas of Culture Libre. We must define the intermediate stages in reaching this goal.

Expansion. Revision. Publication. Next-generation Trolls. Year Five . A great many things lurk just around the corner; new chapters, new publications, new groups of readers and researchers. What can we do with all of them; how will the community manage? Finding out is half the excitement.

On a dark office evening,
Sat down in my chair.
Sharp smell of stale coffee
Circling round in the air.
Suddenly on the webpage
There came a flickering light.
My head grew heavy, and my sight grew dim;
I had to stop for the night.
There it was in the link list:
"Edit page; you'll do well"
And I was thinking to myselfThis could be Heaven or this could be Hell!
Then it lit up the quickbar
And it showed me the way.
There were pages begging clean-up;
I thought I heard them say-ay:

Welcome to the Hotel WikipediaSuch a lovely place (Such a lovely place)So much empty space...Plenty of work at the Hotel WikipediaAny time of yearYou can find us here...

Many links in the PortalDisambigs won't suffice
And users said,We are all just prisoners hereOf our own device.
And in the Most Requested
The list of pages increased;
They edit it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast.
Last thing I remember,
I couldn't take any more.
I had to find the hyperlink back
to the life I had beforeRelax, said the Rambot,We are programmed to receive.You can log out any time you likeBut your work can never leave.

Welcome to the Hotel WikipediaSuch a lovely placeSo much empty spaceThey're typing it in at the Hotel WikipediaThings that you can do—Revertvandals, too—